inspirations from colored folk on food

lately i've been finding a bunch of videos by people of color on food. healthy food (vegan, vegetarian, etc.) and it's quite inspiring. i found this Food Heaven Made Easy with Wendy & Jess on Clutch, Chef Akhi who does raw food, Breeze Harper with Sistah Vegan continues to inspire, and i found this brotha on tumblr.

it's nice to see people of color getting back to our "roots", in a sense, and seeing that our diet is a major factor in our mental well being, and our food choices are political votes, in a sense.
when we purchase food from fast food restaurants that set up shop mostly in lower-income neighborhoods, market their nutritionally vapid and poisonous food to our youth, use advertising that features people of color perpetuating stereotypes (such as "mammy"), that participate in deforestation to house the absurd amount of animals they need to maintain their businesses - we are telling them that we approve of everything they do; we are saying that we support their business. the same goes for meat corporations and grocery stores that place profit above quality and ethics. i've written a post on this a while back, and another one, so i won't go into detail of why fast food and most American food corporations basically shit on everyone, but especially people of color.

i hope more people of color will begin to understand the links between our diets and our overall lifestyles as well as our political acts. but i suppose, first, there needs to be some mad nutritional education. or rather, unlearning unhealthy eating habits.

comment. think. criticize.

Fast Food Nation

i wanted to share a blog i have been following for some time now- Sistah Vegan Project with Breeze Harper.

i really love how she analyzes EVERYTHING. exploring the the spaces in which issues intersect with others brings an entire new perspective on so many things. she talks about how race intersects with diet, how gender issues intersect with race, how both of those intersect with class issues and struggles, how class struggles intersect with diet, their connections with capitalism, its connection with the environment and our treatment of the earth....it's a new concept to think that all these things are connected and to hear and understand how they're connected.

i was just in a discussion on facebook about a physician's letter to the president asking him to consider the people that abuse the system when thinking about making healthcare universal. and the physician said something along the lines of "...the patient informed me they only eat fast food and smoke a pack of cigarettes a day...." (in order to show how many poor choices the patient was making that contributes to their ailments...leaving to doctor to question why they should have to pay for someone's healthcare like this). the fast food portion stuck out to me and i thought about Breeze Harper and her criticisms of the system and how they relate to our food choices.

around January, i stopped eating meat, and soon after that i stopped eating at fast food restaurants. theres a million and one reasons i stopped eating meat, and i may talk about that in another post, but this post is more focused on why i stopped eating fast food.

for one, most of them don't serve a meal (side-dishes, yes, but not full meals, with the exception of salads) without meat in it, so that was my personal issue. second, once meat is removed from the diet, you (well, i) become more conscious of the food groups and what you should be intaking. not getting enough iron or protein could be the difference between having energy and being light-headed just walking up a flight of stairs (not the worst case scenario). and many of these fast food restaurants do not offer fruits and vegetables (again, with the exception of salads), making their menu pretty dim for me. those are the initial reasons, but more importantly, i stopped eating at them because of what they stand for, what they promote and who they target.

i did a post a while back about a book i read that was a catalyst for my diet change and connecting that with another book i read that spoke about the staggering statistics on health (or lack thereof) in black and brown communities.

what they stand for: these companies stand for and benefit from money money and more money. Eating Animals and the documentary Food, Inc. illustrate how fast food chains have taken over the meat industry and made it what it is today (i.e. an industry that raises sick, diseased animals for the cheapest amount of money to produce the highest amount of profits while treating farmers, factory workers, restaurant employees and consumers like shit). the demand for meat has skyrocketed based almost solely on these fast food chains. they don't stand to feed the hungry (because TONS of their food is thrown away daily. i used to work at McDonalds. trust me.), they don't stand to help anyone's diet. they stand simply to take your money at the least cost to them. eating at these places is filling some white man's pocket and nothing more.

what they promote: fast food chains promote shitty, nutritionally vapid, cheap (cheap monetarily and qualitatively)....shit. lol...i don't know any other word to describe their food. theres a few people taking a photo a day or carrying around months or year old hamburgers and fries from McDonalds that AREN'T AGING. what kind of bread or meat doesn't mold or break down in some fashion? they promote illness, obesity, and all around bad health. we're making some corporation fatter while we somewhere down the line develop type 2 diabetes and hope we don't have to get one of our fingers or limbs cut off.

who they target: they target low-income families , most of which are black and brown communities. in my last post i talked about the Church's Chicken commercials with the black woman selling chicken with her exaggerated accent and neck twisting taking me back to the images of mammy. but look at any fast food restaurant commercials, who are in them (Popeye's, Church's, Checkers, and McDonald's)? whats that-oh, black people and brown people? whats that i hear-hip-hop? and urban slang? did she just say "chile"? oh....and they're dancing? ....seriously?

if the top paid marketing companies that design these commercials were to lay out their plans and reasoning behind why they chose who they chose for the commercials, why they have certain music playing and why the script sounds like it was written by a high schooler from brooklyn....everyone would be up in arms about how racist it is, yet when you see the product...i guess it becomes blurry for some of us.

the book, Killing the Black Body is also a good book that talks about mainly forced sterilization of colored women and reproductive rights, but it also goes into the history of health and takes it back to how food has basically been another factor in the demise of black and brown communities. during slavery, food was used to keep the slave alive just enough so that he/she could work, make babies, or serve the slave owner. eating lard, gravy and other scraps of menial food was what they had to eat to survive. can we not see the correlation between that time and black and brown people STILL eating only what can get us by and not things that aid in our betterment and longevity?

this is as much an individual issue as it is a societal. we have to be the ones to demand that these companies start offering better food options, to children especially. how much of the blame does the parent own when, for example, they have only 10 dollars to last them the rest of the week?-theres McDonald's EVERYWHERE (convenience) and their dollar menu allows for you to spend $3 (cheap) on a meal when anywhere else would be at least double that. and the company knows this. as much money as McDonald's, for instance, is making, there is no way they could not afford to offer fresh fruits and vegetables or maybe just better quality food like...i don't know...REAL meat.

the capitalistic system we live in is as much to blame for unhealthy eating choices as our individual will is. when this is the food we've been raised on (because our parents were working class), what we know, what our culinary preferences have come to love, it's no wonder black and brown communities have to many illnesses, diseases, and deaths based on factors that could have been avoided like our diet. these restaurants are the enemies, but the change that needs to happen is going to have to start with us before they will change. we have to make a dent somewhere in their pockets or raise enough awareness around the negatives of these fast food chains in order for something to change. although you as an individual can make a start by not eating from these restaurants or doing it less often.

comment. think. change your eating habits. analyze your diet. prioritize. criticize.

also, check out a post i did a while back on food. and some hip hop on food.

Food Food Yup Yup

the other day i was watching Book TV on CSPAN-2 and they were doing an interview with two authors. one was the author of the book Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer, and he was basically making the case for eating more consciously. he was a vegetarian, and at best, i think he advocated veganism, but i think he simply wanted people to think about what they were eating; what they were feeding their kids, as well as the type of industry meat is in the united states. he threw out a few statistics and facts. one thing he said that stood out to me was that chickens, for example, have been bred not to live past puberty, so their immune systems are extremely weak, if not non-existent. this causes the people who breed them to pump them with antibiotics their entire short lives. so we're consuming sick animals. he also noted how meat has been the culprit of some of the worst diseases in the 21st century (swine flu, mad cow, etc.).

so i've been thinking a lot lately about what i eat and how i go about it.
its not a secret that the biggest consumers of this cheap, sick, highly processed and medicated animals are those in low-income communities, which tend to be filled with people of color. blacks feel as though foods like fried chicken, chitlins, and just about anything deep fried is a part of our "tradition" or "culture", while not realizing that this type of food is doing nothing but killing us and adding to our health problems.
excluding homicide, the biggest killer for blacks is Heart Disease, whose biggest risk factor is high blood cholesterol and being overweight...which have a direct link to the type of foods we consume. and while i know that many people consume these unhealthy foods usually because they are cheap. i know this more than anyone. the $1 menu at McDonald's with their processed "meat" can fill me up, as opposed to a meal of $5 at any other restaurant. even a salad at McDonald's is around $5. fresh fruits vegetables cost more and rot faster than canned fruits and vegetables (which contain additives, preservatives, and typically contain large amounts of sugar or salt). we all know this, but i think for the majority of us, we can at least cut meat from our diets for one or two days a week. and even that can make a difference for your health as well as for the environment.

this is an excerpt from the book Medical Apartheid:

"...medical experts of every persuasion agree that African Americans share the most deplorable health profile in the nation by far, one that resembles that of Third World countries. ... Twice as many African American babies as babies of other ethnic groups die before their first birthday. One and a half times as many African American adults as white adults die every year. Blacks have dramatically higher rates of nearly every cancer, of AIDS, of heart disease, of diabetes, of liver disease, of infectious diseases, and they even suffer from higher rates of accidental death, homicide, and mental illness. before they die young of in droves from eminently preventable diseases, African Americans also suffer far more devastating but equally preventable disease complications, such as blindness, confinement to wheelchairs, and limb loss. studies continue to demonstrate that, far from sharing in the bounty of American medical technology, African Americans are often bereft of high-technology care, even for life-threatening conditions such as heart disease."

the book lacks the sources for these claims, but almost all that i have found back up what is being said.

i think for us, we have been trying to find some type of culture that is our own that we have come to cling to anything resembling a "culture", even when it may be detrimental to our wellbeing. slaves didn't eat the innards of animals because they wanted to, it was because they had to. even if they knew it was contributing to their plethora of ailments, they had to eat this to survive. but most of us live in a financial state (and under a government) that allows us to eat what we want. which makes it all the more ludicrous that many of us are still eating slave food (no, not soul food, SLAVE FOOD)?
we are survivors; our people are survivors. nearly everything about our lives was controlled in an attempt to break us down. the way we thought was attacked, the way we lived, the way we communicated, and lastly, what we ate. again, we are survivors; our people are survivors, and if we attempt progression in all of these other aspects, then why not in the arena of food consumption? why then are we continuing destroy our bodies?
and this is not just for blacks (although there is more cause for concern amongst blacks), this includes southerners, Chicanos, and Americans as a whole, seeing as how we're the most obese nation on the planet.
i think in order for one to progress; to aid in the progression of others; to aid in the progression of our cultures; our societies, that we must be conscious of everything we do- from how we dress, how we live, how we socialize, how we love, how we think, how we spend our money, how we make our money, how speak, AND what we eat. they are all a reflection of yourself.

i am not advocating vegetarianism or veganism (not at this moment in time anyway...), because i myself am neither of those. however, i do advocate being more conscious of what you consume, what your children consume, and how it effects you as an individual, and ultimately your society. if you want to eat meat, you should know where your meat comes from, how it is slaughtered, and how it was raised, how that industry impacts our nation and the ultimately, the world, and how the meat will effect you. we can decrease our intake of meat, for example, or buy meat that is steroid/antibiotic free or pasture raised. most of us (including myself) do not know these things about most of the meats we consume (let alone items we don't, such as other processed foods, soaps, all-purpose cleaners, and cosmetics). but we should

comment. criticize. comment. try some veggie burgers. whatever.

here's some websites i found that deal with health statistics:
FASTSTATS
Black Health Care.com statistics from the '90's
Meat vs. Veggie
About.com
minority health.hhs.org
Minority Women's Health

and heres some interesting websites about the environmental aspects of vegetarianism:
Vegetarian Lifetips
Meat Industry's water consumption
Deforestation caused by meat consumption
environmentalism.suite101.com
Vegetarianism is the new prius article